The Warriors can't stay above water in the West without Stephen Curry. And if they sink in the next few weeks, don't blame it on a torn oblique. This was coming before Curry ever grabbed his right side on Wednesday night.
Start with what's confirmed. Curry left the Houston game in the first quarter with right abdominal soreness, made what turned out to be his only basket of the night, a 3-pointer with about seven and a half minutes left in the opening period, and winced as he backpedaled. He didn't come back. He has an oblique abdominal tear and will be re-evaluated in two weeks. Steve Kerr said he'd tweaked something in that area he'd "never done" before, and he sounded plenty worried about it afterward.
Two weeks is just when they'll check on it again. The reporting around it already floats a return closer to a month, and that's before any ramp-up. Plan for Golden State being without its only available star for the longer end of that range.
Rating
RatingNow look at the schedule they have to survive. A road run through San Antonio, New Orleans and Dallas, a back-to-back finisher at Memphis, then Boston at home before Sacramento and a trip to Portland. That's a conference gauntlet for a healthy team. For this one, it's a trapdoor.
This is where the front office has to answer for itself. Curry didn't walk into this absence alone. Jimmy Butler is out after ACL surgery earlier this year, not expected back until early 2027. Kristaps Porzingis has been away from the team indefinitely since the start of training camp. Moses Moody is rehabbing a knee toward a 2027 return. By the time Curry went down, Golden State already had more than $150 million of its payroll in suits on the bench. This is a roster built with no insurance on the one outcome it couldn't afford.
RTGThey bet the season on Curry staying healthy, after chasing fragile stars and shedding the depth that used to cover for exactly this. When that's your plan and your plan gets a strained oblique, you don't get to call it misfortune.
Two weeks is a mild diagnosis next to how ugly oblique tears can get, and Frank Vogel has this defense playing with teeth, sitting 11th in the NBA in defensive rating early on. Between Draymond Green, Brandin Podziemski, De'Anthony Melton and a center rotation of Charles Bassey and Al Horford, they can grind out low-scoring nights and steal a couple. That's the ceiling here: steal a couple, lose a few, hang around the play-in line and wait.
Treading water assumes you have a lifeboat, and the people who built this team spent theirs in the offseason. If the Warriors come out of this stretch still holding a top-six seed, thank Vogel and the defense, because nothing about the margin ownership left them earned it. And if they're scrambling back toward .500 when Curry returns, remember the problem was already there. The tear just switched on the lights.
